Book excerpt: Reveals how Katherine Mansfield's understanding of art and music shaped and inspired her writingThis volume emphasises the centrality of Katherine Mansfield to the cultural life of her time, illuminating how her love of painting and of music inspired her art. The Fauvist paintings of the Scottish colourist F.D. Fergusson, the music of Debussy, and indeed, of Wagner, all helped to forge a precise aesthetic, founded above all on the intense study and - in the case of music - practice of artistic technique. The essays in this volume explore Mansfield's relationships with the visual arts and with music, bringing to light the way in which these helped to shape the formal qualities of her writing: its beauty of line and intensely musical effects. Mansfield's relationship with Woolf is also strongly in the frame. As befits a volume dedicated to the arts, there is an introduction, poetry and a new short story by highly-acclaimed writers who count Mansfield amongst their chief inspirations.